A Python Logging Server by Doug Farrell Original at: http://code.google.com/p/python-loggingserver/
Steve Steiner ([email protected]) ssteinerX github: https://[email protected]/ssteinerx/ssx-twisted-loggingserver.git
This project provides a Python Logging Server based on the Twisted framework. This creates a centralized logging server to complement the logging module's SocketHandler client.
Python's logging is wonderful, but when you have multiple servers that you need to monitor, having each process logging to its own file, on separate servers, things get pretty unmanageable pretty fast. Logging into the servers is a chore, finding the log files is a chore, finding the information you need is a chore.
This is not efficient; anything with "chore" attached to it needs to be fixed.
This logging server resolves these issues by providing the following:
- Provides a single central log file for all connected processes
- Can sink virtually unlimited external logging servers
- The web service:
- Provides a centralized status page showing:
- Some statistics on the logging server itself
- A color coded, chronological listing of the most recent log messages, updated in realtime via a websocket
- A separate user configurable CSS file to control the presentation of the status page
Requires Twisted and pyyaml. Should be handled by setup.py, see INSTALL.rst.
ssteinerX-twisted-loggingserver isn't a package that is added to a running application, it is a twistd daemon plugin that runs stand alone. When run it reads its configuration file and begins to listen on two network socket ports for messages.
On one port it is listening for log messages that were transmitted by client programs.
On the other port it is listening for HTTP requests for the status page.
Starting a twistd daemon with this plugin is covered in the DAEMON.rst file.
FIXED: ssteinerX -- the loggingserver.css file is now just served by Twisted >The loggingserver.css file will need to be accessible to the web based status >page, you'll see in the default code it's referenced as >http://lcoalhost/loggingserver.css.
>This means that a web server answering to port 80 will need to have access to >the file in order to serve it up. For a production system you'll want to put >this on a web server at a URL you can rely on and change the >loggingserverwebpage.py file to reflect this.
The logging server is run as a daemon process by Twisted, and is invoked as follows:
twistd --pidfile=loggingserver.pid --logfile=loggingserver.log --python=loggingserver.py
This will tell Twisted to start the logging server by running the loggingserver.py main file. It will save the PID of the process in the loggingserver.pid file and it will log its own messages to the loggingserver.log file. These are just an example of how to run the logging server, modify as need be for your purposes.
The logging server process can be stopped by this line:
kill cat loggingserver.pid
Once you have the logging server running as described above, you can test the system by running the client test application. This is done as follows:
python loggingtest.py <module name>
Where <module name> is just single string value used by the logging system to register a module name for logging. This name will show up in the logged messages.
Once the test is running bring up a web server and browse to http://localhost:9021, which will take you to the status page, and should be showing messages as they are coming in from the test application.
You can run as many instances of the test application as you'd like, and you'll see log messages from all of them appearing in the status window. To stop the test application hit CTRL-C, which will cause it to exit gracefully.
I wrote a more complete article about the logging server that appeared in the October issue of Python Magazine.
Comment by [email protected], Aug 06, 2009
Excellent app ... i'm writing a python system monitor using most from psi and enumprocess, so your app is very usefull for me! Trying it right now :)
Comment by andresgattinoni, Jan 28, 2010 Sounds great. Is it possible to integrate the logging server with syslog?
Comment by hugotruffegm, Feb 01, 2010
Hello, you could put the note here to read Python Magazine?. Or take an example because of complications with running the application.
Tutbogears configure an application, which sends a message to the server (critical level). this message reaches the server log, but the webpage did not add the server log and did not show anything.
Log Records Total 0
I will be very helpful
Surely I am configuring something wrong
Comment by ggenellina, Feb 10, 2010 Based on your code, I wrote a smaller recipe that doesn't require Twisted nor any other external package, and is fully auto-contained:
http://code.activestate.com/recipes/577025/
Comment by project member doug.farrell, Apr 13, 2010
Hi everyone, A friend pointed out that there are comments here, which I hadn't seen as they are quite long after the article published. My apologies for not looking sooner.
I might look at integrating the logging_server with syslog, but at present it's lower on my priority list than other items to work on.
ggenellina, very nice Twisted free application you wrote. Based on my experience with Twisted, I think the logging_server is more "bullet proof", but for those people who don't want to install Twisted, or who can't run it (Python 3+ users), your solutions is very good.
I'm thinking about making changes to the logging_server, here is what I'm considering:
- Bring the logging server up to the Twisted 10.0 release.
- Make use of the Twisted plug-in facility to add handlers to the system so users could add customer handling, ie: Instant Messaging for instance.
- Add handlers for XMLRPC, JSON and HTTP Form Encode log messages so other languages besides Python could talk to the logging_server and make use of it.
I'd like to know what you think, thanks! Doug
Comment by [email protected], Today (moments ago)
I just found this and would love to help.
I need this to monitor a cluster of servers with a real-time web display of log info at various levels, so I'm going to have to serve on multiple ports or make the filtering part of the web page.
I haven't gotten this running yet, but I'm on Python 2.7 and Twisted 10.1, so I'll certainly make any necessary changes available to anyone who wants them.
I'm going to fork this at github so I can work on it, my github ID is ssteinerx as well if anyone wants to follow along there.
S aka/ssteinerX aka/Steve Steiner
Comment by [email protected], Today (moments ago)
I have posted fixes for two of the issues in the issue tracker, created a README.txt from the wiki contents, and am now adding a setup.py.
For my own use, I'm going to have to document how to pull this into a Twisted app from the installed version, so I'll post that to the wiki on github (i don't seem to be able to do anything but comment here on google).
I need a WebSocket? based implementation for my monitor, and have that (WebSocket?, that is)working well in Twisted, so I'll probably throw that in for fun later.
Anyone who wants to follow or help, or if you'd like to pull my fixes in:
https://github.com/ssteinerx/python-loggingserver
Thanks,
S